Sultana

I was as surprised as anyone when our prime minister called a surprise election. OK, with Libdems knocked out in 2015 and Labour tearing themselves apart, she has no opposition in most of the country: she’ll walk it, right? But just after setting the clock ticking on brexit??? Good grief, how can we afford the time for this nonsense? Her policy platform looked like the progeny of an unlikely match of Farage and Miliband, with a touch more of Blairite authoritarianism that either of the main parents would seem likely to favour.

To state my own prior position, I was a strong supporter of Mrs Thatcher in my youth, but have become much-disillusioned with her successors, as browsing this blog (e.g. here) will reveal. I had hoped that the Libdems might come to the election with a positive programme I could support despite inevitable elements of gratuitous Political Correctness and the Loony Left, but they were quick to disappoint. Once again, I say None of the Above.

The justification seemed dodgy from the start, raising a strawman argument about being frustrated by … well, in fact, an exceptionally supine parliament. A couple of outright lies put my back up somewhat. But anyway, the Chattering Classes soon came up with some ideas: she wanted a personal mandate; she needed a big majority to stand up to the loony fringe of her own party. Really?

I live in a very marginal constituency, so I expected to be on the receiving end of some campaigning. The first I received on the doormat some weeks ago was a large glossy from which a mugshot of Jeremy Corbyn stared up at me. Interesting: Labour have got into gear commendably fast? Nope, this was Tory literature, featuring a bogeyman as its most important message.

When the (less-glossy) actual Labour leaflet followed, the only mugshot in it was the candidate himself. And a set of policies that read like a checklist of opposing everything the Tories are trying to do right. Ugh. No mention of Corbyn: is this candidate trying to dissociate himself from his own leader?

A second Tory letter – this time in an envelope – calls for a mandate not for my candidate, nor for the Party, but for Mrs May herself. Well, sorry, I can’t vote for that. Even if I wanted to live in Maidenhead (her constituency), I’ll never be able to afford it, so I don’t get the chance to vote either for or against her. But the message is becoming clearer than ever: we are to dispense with Parliament, relegate them to something more like a US-style electoral college, and crown our Supreme Leader. This cult of personality is not entirely new: perhaps we should be glad that she’s being more open about it than in the past? But coupled with her authoritarian leanings and secrecy over her agenda beyond the coronation, it scares me.

No more leaflets until last Friday, when a sudden flurry brought one each from the Libdems, UKIP, and an Independent, plus three more from the Tories for a total of five from them (good grief)! Only the Greens missing (perhaps they practice what they preach?), and sadly our Green party is solidly Loony Left. The Independent candidate actually has an anti-party platform I could strongly support (it’s distantly related to my own), but sadly falls down on other issues. And neither the Libdem nor UKIP feature their respective party leaders, so maybe I was being unduly cynical about Labour doing likewise.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Surprisingly, her bogeyman doesn’t seem to be doing the job of annihilating himself. Indeed, Corbyn is looking the most statesmanlike of a dreadful bunch, and his own party have suppressed their hatred for him and moved from attacking him to ‘clarifying’ what he says. The “strong and stable” and “coalition of chaos” slogans have come back to bite her as it becomes painfully clear she herself is more chaos than strength, and the latest image of Corbyn “naked and alone“(!!!) with all those Eurocrats sounds almost like panic. It’s obviously nonsense: brexit negotiations will be conducted by Sir Humphrey’s civil servants regardless of who wins the election. In the still-inconceivable event of Labour beating the tories, I expect their political master would be Sir Kier Starmer, KCB, QC, not Corbyn himself.

So Corbyn has momentum. How far can it take him? Not into government, but perhaps far enough to upset the master plan. We need a bigger rallying point than that mugshot. What do people respond to, fast? Not any new promises: messing with the manifesto is just more egg on the face. It’s got to be a real threat. Big enough to grab the headlines and the national conversation. And preferably focus attention on matters where We Beat Them in public trust.

Where can we find such a threat? Given the tight timescale, we’re never going to make it with a foreign power. But there are a fair few alienated idiots in Blighty, susceptible to being inspired by heroes like the biblical Samson. We’re told our security forces have thwarted no fewer than five terrorist attacks in two months between the Westminster Bridge attack (March 22nd) and the Manchester one (May 25th – being more than a month into the election campaign). That’s more than one a fortnight, so it’s unlikely to be long before a next attempt. If one of those gets through, we have our threat and out enemy to rally against, and of course security is precisely where both the parties and their leaders individually are very clearly differentiated!

With that in mind, it seems an extraordinarily convenient coincidence that Manchester happened when it did: surely the security theatre of raising the threat level and deploying troops on the streets would kill that momentum and distract the media from the manifesto fiasco? Against all expectations, it didn’t! Then we had London Bridge, and this time a firm No Nonsense message: playing directly to traditional strengths.

Of course suggesting a connection is deep into conspiracy theory. But for the security forces – who routinely prevent terrorist attacks – to have failed twice in such quick succession – is extremely unlikely to be purely random. Did someone quietly send 007 on a wild goose chase – like for instance looking for Russian influence in the election – and leave Clouseau in charge back home? No, that’s a bit far-fetched. A botched information system update disrupting communication among anti-terrorist forces would make far more sense. And since all the people concerned work on a need-to-know basis and only see small parts of the overall systems, no individual would actually know what was going on!

And just to add icing to the conspiracy, what if the botch messed with third-party systems that must access the anti-terrorist information system, like an airline’s passenger information? What unlikely account might the airline be able to give of it if they were unable to operate? No, ignore that, it’s too far-fetched: BA is much more likely to have been hit by their own botch, perhaps with the aid of the big thunderstorms we had on the Friday night.